The Bradford Pageant of 1931

There could hardly have been a less
auspicious time for staging a historical pageant. The world economy was in the
jaws of the most vicious depression of the 20th Century. In Bradford,
an industrial city heavily dependent on exports, tens of thousands of workers
were unemployed and wages were being slashed for those lucky enough to have
jobs. Between 1928 and 1932, nearly 400 textile firms in the city were to go
bankrupt.

On Monday July 13 1931, disrupted by
heavy rain showers, the Historical Pageant of Bradford started its scheduled one-week
run in Peel Park. An account of the event in the Yorkshire Post the next day said: “…[The performers] faced the
disadvantages of drenching rain and slippery turf with commendable pluck. For their
sake, as well as for the pleasure of the spectators, it is hoped that more
congenial conditions will obtain for the remainder of the week.” That proved
optimistic. Briefly, on the Thursday, the Yorkshire
Evening Post witnessed a break in the bad weather and the “ill luck that
has followed” the pageant but, by then, there were fears that it would make a
significant loss.

The Liberal leader David Lloyd George, in a speech to the pageant
crowd the same day, drew a parallel between the grim global situation and the local
downpours: “Things are bad, not here merely, but throughout the world. It is a
big deluge, as in the days of Noah. It has covered the highest mountains and
the waters seem to be rising, not [just] here, but elsewhere as well, […] In
Central Europe the clouds are getting denser and darker, and you might have a
cloudburst there. Never mind, the waters will subside. It will be all right.”
The rain returned on the Friday and, on Saturday July 18, the planned finale,
the Lord Mayor of Bradford Alfred Pickles paid “tribute to the
spirit and grit displayed by the performers in spite of the terrible weather.”

In spite of, or perhaps because of, the unusually difficult
circumstances of the Bradford Pageant, the objectives of its organisers had
been ambitious even by the extravagant standards of the pageant movement.
Pageant organisers since the Edwardian era had routinely espoused their events’
ability to educate, nurture democracy and foster patriotism and civic pride.
The economic benefits of organising a large tourist event were often
downplayed. At Bradford, Mayor Alfred Pickles, a member of the Independent
Labour party and one of the prime movers behind the event, aimed at nothing
less than economic revival:

"We were eager to see those standing looms running full-time
again. Each of us knew somebody who was suffering because machinery had to
stand idle. And for the sake of that ‘somebody’ each of us wanted to do his
bit."

The opening speech of the pageant,
delivered by Prince George (later the Duke of Kent), was clear about this aim,
saying the pageant would “increase the prosperity of the city and help to
promote the revival of its trade,” and the theme runs through other speeches.
Indeed, the original idea for the pageant had been to provide a cultural complement to an industrial
fair, the Imperial Wool Industries Fair, held the same month at Bradford’s
Olympia Hall.

A
commentary in the Telegraph and Argus
newspaper on July 11, 1931 gives a sense of the extent of the ambition,
describing the pageant as an “attempt to provide the wool industry with the
finest advertisement of a world-wide character that it has ever enjoyed. In
this respect the Pageant is associated with the Imperial Wool Fair, and it
would be nothing short of disastrous were either of these great undertakings to
meet with failure in their endeavours to benefit an industry that has sustained
so many severe blows in recent years.”

There
is an element of desperation to some of this rhetoric and a utilitarian tone
that is not familiar to a student of earlier pageants, but for the first two
thirds of the Bradford script there is little deviation from the conventions of
pageant making. The pageant master was Frank Lascelles, a leading
pageant organizer since the Edwardian period, and a significant proportion of
the book of words—consisting of a prologue and six episodes written by a team
of local writers including the then still emergent novelist Phyllis Bentley—could have
been transplanted from Edwardian precursors such as Colchester (1909) or Oxford
(1907).

The first episode, “The Coming of the
Romans,” describes the invaders subduing the native Britons, a stock opening
for pageant writers. This is followed by “Paulinus in Bradford Dale”,
describing the Christianization of Bradford. The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons
is represented by a battle of voices: The heathens’ war song is gradually
replaced by Christian monks’ chanting and singing hymns. The third episode, by
Phyllis Bentley, “Bradford in Norman Times,” is the most picturesque,
introducing Robin Hood and the tale of “the boar of Cliffe Wood above Bradford
Church,” in which Roger of Manningham is recognised as the slayer of a
rampaging boar (whose head still sits in Bradford’s coat of arms). The “Bradford
in Stuart Times” episode focuses on the English Civil War, in which the city
had played a significant part. This was often an unavoidable subject for
pageant writers and one that was usually handled with diffidence, given the
subject’s contemporary political, constitutional and religious ramifications. The
Bradford script adopts a familiar approach (seen also at the York Pageant of
1909, for instance) in stressing reconciliation, the courtesy of both factions,
and the nobility of the Fairfax family.

However, the Bradford event was never
going to be a “normal” pageant: Here was a sentimental mass drama inspired by
the whimsical and touristic pageantry of Edwardian Britain teetering atop the
cultural life of a chimney-studded industrial city in in the grip of a
harrowing slump. The organisers were aware of the disconnect. Mayor Pickles,
speaking during the pageant week, criticised sceptics who had thought it could
never be done: “They felt we were devoid of imagination in this smoky
city of ours, and that the word ‘pageantry’ really had not a place in our local
vocabulary. They appeared to think that only towns with ancient castles or
places of that kind were really suitable for holding pageants.”

Behind the scenes, the approach was aggressively
modern. It was not unusual for pageants to appeal successfully to national
audiences and the national media, but Bradford, in line with its aim of
advertising the city’s industry, was single-minded in doing so. Prince George, Lloyd George and the
Lord Mayor of London were among the national figures opening each day of the
event and newspapers across the country, as well as widely distributed
newsreels, covered proceedings. Some of the speeches were broadcast on the BBC.

Bradford was one of the first major
pageants to use electricity extensively. Telephone lines were set up to carry
messages more quickly to the large number of participants and microphones were
used to make the outdoor drama easier to hear. A microphone was also installed
for the first time in Bradford Cathedral to broadcast the Archbishop of York’s pageant
sermon. In the large city pageants of the Edwardian period, the final scene of
a pageant was often timed so that it coincided with the setting of the sun, but
at Bradford twenty large electric floodlights extended the finale of the
pageant into the evening. The electric lighting illuminated the industrial
revolution scenes near the end of evening performances, and added modern drama
to the Lord Mayor’s final address and the singing of “Land of Hope and Glory”.

Bradford may not have had an ancient
castle but it was extremely well equipped for a critical part of any pageant’s
spectacle: the costumes. Throughout the drama, thousands of performers dressed
in garments made with local textiles served as a living advertisement for
Bradford’s industry and, according to the Yorkshire Observer’s souvenir
programme, the production of this spectacle was a quasi-industrial process, involving
the transformation of more than 25,000 yards of “multi-coloured materials into
the gayest and biggest variety of costumes Bradford has ever seen.”

Lascelles visualised
“each scene as an artist visualises the picture he is to paint” and a team of
students led by Mr. H. Butler at the Bradford College of Art and Crafts then
produced 225 original designs and 7,750 duplicates based on that unified vision.
Patterns were made by evening school teachers under Ms. Ida Skemp, duplicated
by pattern makers in the city, and then sent out to individual performers to
make up. Difficult or particularly important designs were made up by local
firms.

The clear view that the pageant had to serve as a
commercial advertisement for the city was reflected in the drama itself. In
the Prologue, a shepherdess standing in the middle of a flock of sheep, sets up
the entire narrative inside a textile metaphor:

"As my cloth is woven from the wool I know so well, so today,
in this great city of industry, my aim is to weave for you a story that shall
be like a beautiful fabric[…] a tapestry of many colours and many figures that
will please the eye and linger in your memory."

The text moves through the production of woolen
textiles, from the flock of sheep in the prologue, to a sheep shearing spectacle
and song set at Kirstall Abbey in the Norman episode, to a “spinning chorus”
(set to music by Wagner, probably the Spinning Chorus from the Flying Dutchman)
at the start of the fourth episode (“Bradford in Plantagenet Times” by Phyllis
Hambledon), to a discussion of the production of “fine and smooth” cloth in the
second scene of the same episode. This scene is not the first assertion of commercialism
in the drama—at the end of episode 3 the audience hears resounding cries of
“Who’ll buy?” in a depiction of the establishment of Bradford’s market—but it
marks the start of the story of the city’s textile industry and its commercial
success. The rest of the pageant is full of what
we might now call “product placements” by the wool industry, from a scene
showing men stuffing the Lord Chancellor’s “woolsack” with Bradford wool to
girls enthusing over silk ribbon, a famous Bradford product, in the final
episode.

The reign of Edward III, who is
introduced in the historical notes as having done “much to help the woollen
industry, then at the beginning of its real development,” is represented by a
group of townspeople and customers bartering over a sale of wool and discussing
techniques from Europe that will transform the efficiency and quality of their
work. In a city whose history had already been defined by the 1930s by large
waves of German, Jewish and Irish immigration, it is interesting that the
beginnings of the modern textile industry were explicitly portrayed as Bradford
people learning from Flemish immigrants (the stage directions call for “Flemish
weavers and spinners […] teaching their craft to groups of men and women
gathered round them”).

Large city pageants in the pre-war era
had generally avoided representation of history after the 1700s; indeed Louis
Napoleon Parker, the father of modern pageantry, had advocated stopping short
of the Civil War because it was too divisive. Attempting to tell the story of
Bradford without depicting its transformation in the industrial revolution
would, however, have been absurd, so the climax of the Bradford event is an interesting
sixth episode written by Elizabeth Southwart, “Bradford of the Industrial
Revolution.”

While the tendency of most pageant
writing is to stress the resolution of conflict or avoid it altogether when it
has any contemporary resonance, Southwart’s second scene vividly depicts the impact
of child labour, the fear of the mill’s overlooker, protests against starvation
in which marchers carry loaves soaked in blood, and a Luddite attack on a mill
in the Bradford suburb of Shipley. (“We’ll burn their cursed mills.)

There is an interlude recreating a
procession in Bradford in 1825 to commemorate the patron saint of wool workers,
Saint Blaise, which appears to have presented an opportunity to show off
sumptuous textiles while also asserting the pageant’s link to earlier civic
processions. The next and last scene is a chaotic depiction of an electoral
hustings at the time of the 1832 Reform Act. The boisterous proceedings raise
major political controversies of the 19th Century--free speech, corn
law reform, abolition of the slave trade and regulation of child labour--and
subject them to roars of approval or disapproval from “the mob”. The most
popular candidate is from the Lister family, who were later to build Listers’
Mill, a huge silk mill in the Bradford area that employed thousands of local
workers in 1931. The candidate’s son, who may have been the scion who built the
mill, is carried away on a chair by the mob and occasionally given a jolt when
they pretend to drop him.

This scene marks the end of the drama
and is an unusually anarchic culmination to a major pageant. The eccentricity
may be partly explained by the personalities on the writing and organising
committees, although there is nothing in the contemporary coverage suggesting
it was received as a dissident or partisan event. But another factor may simply
have been the extraordinary circumstances in which the pageant was being
staged. It may simply not have been credible to present the wool industry as a
harmonious idyll in Bradford in July 1931.

Only a few days before the opening day,
the Woolcombing Employers’ Federation had posted a notice announcing an 11.8
per cent wage reduction to more than 8,000 workers and, on July 10, the workers
had decided to strike. In fifty mills in the Bradford and Shipley districts,
work was expected to cease on July 13, the day of the opening of the Pageant.

Mayor Pickles published an urgent
appeal in the Yorkshire Post “not to post notices with respect to reduction in
wages until after Pageant Week, which will be opened on Monday next, 13th
inst., by H.R.H. Prince George, or if such notices have been posted to withdraw
the same.” He said: “I am anxious to see both
sides make a real effort to reach a settlement, and a short postponement of
the notices will not only help the Pageant but will also afford an opportunity
of bringing about peace by negotiation.” He said he had ‘no desire to prejudice
either party” and that the pageant was “entirely non-political”, reminding them
that the event was for the entire city and that the profit was “to be
distributed amongst charitable institutions in the city”. The appeal was only partly successful. In Bradford
itself the mills kept working, but in the Shipley area the strike went on.

In the event, the second scene of the
final episode—the scene that depicted extreme poverty and Luddism at the
Shipley mill—was printed in the official book of words but omitted from the
actual performance “owing to the exigencies of dramatic production.” The
decision to drop it was reported by the special scenes sub-committee on July 9,
just as the industrial dispute loomed, and it is tempting to speculate
(although there is insufficient documentary evidence to prove it) that the
harsh circumstances of the Bradford pageant eventually overwhelmed its attempt
to depict the modern textile industry. In the end, at least in the version
performed in Peel Park, the absurdity of a Bradford pageant that did not
portray industrial revolution in wool making was what the audience were left
with.

There is no evidence that the event
provided a major boost to Bradford’s textile trade. Despite being a dominant
theme in the rhetoric surrounding the event, this aim had always been met with
scepticism from the harder heads in the business community. In January 1931,
Bradford Chamber of Commerce had warned: “From the past experience the Chamber
does not think that exhibitions will be of much service to the Industry, but it
notes the proposal to hold the Fair and trusts it may be a success.” In March, The
Bradford Chamber of Commerce Journal carried a more explicit statement:
“[W]e have learned—at a cost to our members of a quarter of a million Sterling
since 1924—that the value of exhibitions to us is of very small importance.” Recruitment
of exhibitors at the Imperial Wool Industries Fair appears to have been poor
and charging for space had to be dropped shortly before the event in order to
fill it up. The big textile firms were notable by their absence from the
advertising in the pageant’s book of words and souvenir programme.

And yet, despite the economic climate
and foul weather, we can’t simplistically dismiss the Bradford Pageant as a
failure. It captured the imagination of a large part of the city. The Yorkshire Observer Budget estimated
about 30,000 people participated, about a tenth of the population. The city’s
educational institutions embraced it enthusiastically and all of the main
newspapers supported it. The threat of a financial loss was averted by
extending the pageant run for four days, a decision that was dramatically
presented to the crowd on the Saturday (“‘Do you wish the pageant to continue?’
A great affirmative shout went up,” the Yorkshire
Post reported). By the next week, the profit from the pageant was £2,002,
which was combined with donations (£4,237) and given to the Bradford Royal
Infirmary, Royal Eye and Ear Hospital and Children’s Hospital.

For Bradford’s
people, the pageant’s significance and meaning varied from individual to
individual. Lily Crossland recalled the great enthusiasm of children at her
school. Even those who couldn’t afford to go “read about it every night in the
papers and our friends who went brought back the excitement.” Harry Leslie Smith, who was eight and living in extreme
poverty at the time, did not record the event at all in his memoir and
dismissed nostalgic coverage of it angrily in a letter to the Telegraph and Argus
in 2013, saying that it had had no part in the lives of families like his.

But one letter,
published on July 21 1931, in the middle of the pageant’s extended run, captures
the complex feelings that many people may have felt about the staging of an elaborate
mass drama amidst economic distress. The letter, written by a pageant
performer, does not reject the pageant or passionately embrace it, but it does
assert ownership of the drama by the common people, while betraying pent up
anger at the inequalities of pageant making.

“The success of the
Pageant has depended, to no small extent, upon the cheerful, voluntary service
of the many performers, who for weeks have rehearsed, and also performed, under
most inclement weather conditions,” the letter said. “Members of committees and
others have been given free tickets to view the performances, or liberal
concessions have been granted. Up to the present, no concession has been
granted to a performer in order that his or her relatives may view the finished
production. Not all the performers are in full employ. I could mention one
performer, an ex-service man, who has been out of work for months, but still he
carries on cheerfully. The feelings of such men may be imagined when they know
that salaried officials are granted free tickets, while the lowest price of a
comfortable seat is beyond the limit that a diminished income will permit.”

Ayako Yoshino

*First image owned by Ayako Yoshino. Following images taken from The Historical Pageant of Bradford: The Souvenir Book (Bradford, 1931), out-of-copyright and in possession of Ayako Yoshino*